Max Breslauer, attractive, vital and in his mid-thirties, is living as a business consultant in Amsterdam. He is the elder of Simon Breslauer's two sons, who as the only one of a family of poor East European Jews survived the war and established a textile empire in the Netherlands. Simon is an experienced businessman, rough, yet clumsy - and full of sentimentality. Strict and loving at the same time, he values traditions such as the obligatory family dinner on Shabbat, which he uses for suffocating his two sons and his wife with his Jewish worldly wisdoms.